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By the time they’d finished their meals, he realized they hadn’t spoken about work at all—about Morneau or watches ortheir upcoming trip to Riems. Their discussion had been entirely personal—and entirely pleasant. How odd. He’d thought the other day that he wasn’t the type of person who was easily disarmed, but it seemed Ms. Delaney had managed it yet again.
“This was wonderful,” she said, and he initially thought she meant dining with him. But then she said, “Imogen’s pies are becoming a habit, I’m afraid. And those potatoes.” She shook her head as she grinned. “I’m not a cook, but I would kill for this recipe. She says it’s a family secret.”
Of course she had been talking about the food.
She yawned suddenly, and he could see her try to extinguish it, but it became one of those oversize ones that went on and on. “Excuse me,” she said when she regained control. “I’m still not caught up on my sleep.” She eyed him, and he had the sense that she was wondering if he was going to say something unkind.
He was not. “Ms. Delaney, I must apologize for the way I spoke to you Monday evening. It wasn’t like me. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Well, if you’re apologizing, I should, too. I wasn’t exactly the poster girl for how to treat one’s clients.” She smirked, and it was, he thought, at least partially self-deprecating. Before he realized what was happening, she reached out and rested her hand atop his. He nearly jumped out of his seat, from surprise but also from the sensation of tiny electrical currents prickling his skin. Her nails were still that same dark red with undertones of black, their matte finish utterly flawless.
He told himself she was patting his hand sympathetically, as if she, too, understood what it was like to lose one’s cool when one was normally firmly in possession of said cool.
That was all that hand pat meant. If he was feeling it as something... more intense, that was an error of interpretation on his part. He cleared his throat and slid his hand out from under hers. He didn’t want to be rude, but he couldn’t have her touching him any longer. To smooth over any potential awkwardness, he said, briskly, “I was thinking I’d call a car for the return trip. Would you care to join me?”
It became apparent to Cara, a few minutes after leaving the pub, that they were not going directly back to the palace. After conversing briefly with Mr. Benz in German, the driver pulled away and turned down a little cobblestoned street that took them off the village main street.
“Where are we going?”
By the time she’d finished her question, they were pulling up in front of a small church labeled Saint-Sulpice. “This is the church we spoke about. The building, and the congregation, are rather small, Catholicism not being the dominant faith here. But I thought perhaps you’d like to know this was here. If you’d care to go inside and light a candle, I’d be happy to wait for you.”
“Oh!” Again with the exclaiming she kept finding herself doing in Mr. Benz’s presence, but she found she didn’t mind it so much in this context. “I would love that.” She opened the car door. She studied his face for a moment. The warm illumination and shadows created by the overhead light made his jaw look extra sharp. “Thank you.”
He smiled—for real—and said, “You are most welcome.”
Inside, Cara spent more time pondering Mr. Benz than she didGod or Thanksgiving or her faraway parents. If she’d had to answer the question of what the stuffy equerry did over Christmas, a Star Wars marathon would not have been on the list. It wouldn’t have been in the same room as the list—no, it wouldn’t have been in the samestar systemas the list. But seriously, Mr. Benz had gone from being a thorn in her side to a puzzle, and unfortunately, she was a sucker for a good puzzle.
When she emerged from the church, he was sitting in the back seat of the car looking down at something she couldn’t see—a phone, probably. The overhead light was still on, and from this angle, he looked almost angelic. She rolled her eyes at herself. Too much church.
She opened the car and was hit with a wave of... jazz music?
“Oh, Ms. Delaney. You made quick work of that.” He said something to the driver in German, and both the music and the light cut out. They didn’t talk as the car made the short climb up the hill, but as with the lulls in conversation at dinner, it was a companionable sort of silence.
They pulled up in front of the palace, and although Mr. Benz got out when she did, he kept the car door open. Her gaze was drawn to his hand, which was resting on the handle. She had noticed earlier, in the snug, that he had surprisingly good-looking hands. If you looked just at his hands, which were large and veiny in a way that was inexplicably attractive, you might thinkhewas the one that built log cabins for a living.
“If there’s nothing else I can do for you, I’ll be on my way.”
Right.Stop ogling the equerry’s hands.
“I have something I need to see to this evening, otherwise, I’dsee you inside,” he added. You could say a lot about Mr. Benz, but you could never say he didn’t work hard. She respected that.
Also, he was polite. When he wasn’t snipping at her.
What he wasn’t saying, since hewasbeing polite right now, was that she was holding him up, standing there like an idiot staring at his hands. She dragged her gaze up to his face. It was harder than it should have been. “Thank you for everything this evening.”
He nodded curtly but not unkindly. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” She started up the steps but paused and turned when she heard him call, “Ms. Delaney.”
“Yes?”
“Happy Thanksgiving.”
She smiled. “Thank you.” She wasn’t sure how he had done it, but Mr. Benz had made what had started out as a bummer of an evening into an almost enjoyable one.
When she entered the palace, it was to a completely transformed foyer. It was as if someone had, at some point today, hit the on button for Christmas décor. Beribboned garlands hung everywhere, and at the back, where the space opened up under a giant, vaulted ceiling, stood an enormous Christmas tree decorated in red bows, crystal ornaments, delicate silver bells, and tiny white lights. It was gorgeous, but absurdly, it made her miss the shrimpy artificial tree her parents would be putting up at home next week, with its mismatched lights and its plethora of not-thematically-consistent ornaments, many of which she had made as a kid.
Still, the perfect palace tree was buoying. Seeing such an over-the-top sign of Christmas meant her Thanksgiving melancholy could come to an end. Though if she was being honest in assigning credit for the dissipation of her Thanksgiving blues, it probably had to go to Mr. Benz.
Kai responded to Matteo’s unannounced late-night visit by silently letting him in and going directly to the little bar cart he kept in a corner of his cabin and cracking two bottles of beer. Matteo heaved a sigh as he raised his bottle in thanks and drank deeply of Imogen’s amber ale. “You have no idea how long this day has been.”
